WWE President Nick Khan did an interview with Ariel Helwani of BT Sport to talk about a wide range of topics.
First up was whether he’s involved in the decision to cut talent. There have been mass talent cuts since the start of the COVID-19 pandemic and blamed on budget cuts.
“There’s a collective of us, keep in mind in WWE there’s one boss, that’s Vince as we all know. Between Bruce Prichard, Kevin Dunn, Stephanie McMahon, Paul Levesque are all involved in these decisions with ultimately Vince making the final decision on everything.”
Helwani followed up by asking why there were so many cuts this year.
Khan stated, “I don’t know if there’s one explanation for it. I think ultimately what’s looked at, is this person for us going to move the needle now or in the imminent future. By the way, we did have a two-day tryout in Las Vegas, which ended yesterday. Triple H, John Laurinaitis, and Bruce Prichard were all across as were the rest of us. We’ve signed over a dozen new talent coming out of that tryout. And I’m not suggesting that’s why we cut the other talent, but we’re always looking for what’s next. We live in the present, we live in the future, we don’t live in the past. So when people leave and move on with their life and their careers that’s good by us. For us, it’s what works for us and our product at that time and again, what’s going to work down the road and largely in part the existing roster is based on that.”
Khan was asked about rumors of the company being for sale. The WWE President got people talking earlier this week when he said WWE is “open for business” in terms of potentially selling the company.
“A couple of things on that. when I say we’re open for business, that means if someone credible calls on anything, NFT, trading cards, international rights; we take the call. We’re inherently salespeople. We’re not like, ‘we don’t want to talk to this company because they think they’re X.’ If you call and want to pitch us something and you’re a credible company, we’re going to hear the pitch. We’re an entrepreneurial company that Vince and others built over the last 35 years or so and we always want to stay fresh and entrepreneurial in our minds. When I say ‘open for business,’ if someone calls and are credible and asking, ‘Are you guys for sale?’ What is your offer? What are you thinking? We’re not trying to sell it. That’s not our intent. There are no internal meetings about selling this company. The internal meeting is about growing it and the ability that we think we collectively have to tremendously grow what the value of the company is now…..People call all the time about all different things, but we’re not in any active conversations about any of that.
There have been reports that WWE is changing the way NXT works and looks by signing and using taller and younger wrestlers instead of smaller and older wrestlers. Khan was asked about the changes coming to NXT.
“We are doing a complete revamp on NXT led by Triple H, who is really one of the architects of the original NXT.” He talked about wanting to make it easy for people who want to become wrestlers for them to be able to do it.
“In terms of an NXT rebrand, look for it in the next couple of weeks. It’s going to have a whole new look. It’s going to have a whole new feel, and we believe because a lot of the indy wrestlers, if you will, have come through our system and are in our system with Smackdown and Raw now, we don’t want to just keep doing that same thing, we want to look elsewhere for great young talent.”
Khan said the look and the production of the show will change. You can watch the entire interview by clicking on the player below:
